No, There Is No "New Cold War"

China and the U.S. are too connected.

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Nothing excites the media more than a juicy narrative. Get a hook, amplify the drama, find ways to keep it going, and you’ve got months of content that will attract readers like moths to a flame.

For a few years now, one of the mainstream media’s favorite narratives has been “The New Cold War.” Supposedly, it’s just like the last Cold War, only this time China is playing the role of the U.S.S.R. And while this narrative has been gaining steam for a while, this week’s Chinese Spy Balloon episode brought “The New Cold War” onto center stage.

Fellow Substack writer

Noah Smith

wrote a piece entitled, “You are now living through Cold War 2.”

You are now living through Cold War 2

The New York Times, always a sucker for a good war story, played up the dramatics, trying to entice viewers with a scene ripped from a C-list Top Gun spinoff.

The NYT is the journalistic equivalent of the kid who says, “My dad could beat up your dad.”

Yet when we factor out the media noise, there’s little indication the United States and China are actually in a Cold War.

The Original is Always Better.

The Cold War was fought between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. These societies opposed each other for the simple fact they were based on incompatible ideologies. 

The Western side (The U.S., U.K., France, etc.) was comprised of Capitalist countries. Capitalism requires expansion. For the approximate half-millennium of Capitalism’s existence, the easiest way to expand was to find untapped markets, colonize them, and configure trade routes. But by 1950, the planet had been thoroughly mapped and there were no virgin lands ripe for Capitalist expansion.